Saccas
Condottieri, noteworthy for dying in the Vague Revolution whilst an old man, but an old man that stood before the mob in breastplate, morion helmet, and with a brace of pistols. Saccas now is said to have held the mob at bay momentarily with their threat, until upon discharging them both together the shock was sufficient to startle him dead. A Greek given up by the sea long before the Parquet he never saw, he is still remembered in Port Mercy where a madman is considered by the older citizens as being ‘in the saco’, the Spanish for sack. Certainly. when given up by the sea Saccas was convinced he had landed instead upon Crete, which he had never visited, and sought to rally those of Port Mercy against the impending threat of the Ottoman Empire. Despite the heat he would remain in his armour, staring out to the harbour, seemingly expecting to find it filled with Turkish ships daily. Only when it was suggested that he find higher ground did he navigate to the Sirenum Scopuli and there, some decades before it became the Looms, was he taken into the care of Pargo. Saccas never quite changed in his belief as to where he was, assuring the ‘Cretans’ that they were all notoriously mad, much to the enduring amusement of his new companions. Yet Saccas was not some lunatic, no frenzy attended his delusions. Indeed, aside from his determined fears he served very well in the Sirenum Scopuli, regularly venturing between there and Port Mercy to see to certain pronouncements, taxations, and disputes, aiding the bookkeepers where they needed some visible authority. Nor were his fears cowardice, for Saccas later became the first of the condottieri after Happy Albert, and on occasion acted in that role in the battles of Por Ahi, in the verde. It was he that first referred to the leaders that emerged from the sojary as hawkwood, and if he was ever the paymaster rather than the capitan in such expeditions no tales relate anything but his bravery. So too of his willingness that, having paid another to command the sojars, to still share their privations whilst all with the tangled greater, more secretive necessity for such endeavours, his own responsibility. So too did he partake in exploration, at first to seek the truth of what became of the then late Pargo’s son Casimiro (who had likewise ventured, and vanished, into the verde), and then for his own reasons. Indeed, many of the tales of the verde that relate as to what can be found there originate with Saccas. So much so indeed that Saccas was without doubt the inspiration (or the outright target of its mockery) for the popular play the ‘Chavalier Du Sacs’. Wherein which the eponymous knight enjoys many haphazard adventures in the verde, always winning out through sheer luck, albeit often at his expense. Saccas himself already old when the play was first performed never commented upon it, nor too those that followed such as Sacs Et Tu Tigre! This last describes the adventure of the knight when he becomes captive of the lotus eating tiger men, eventually blending in with them after being left in a pit whose bars then served to sunburn him in stripes enabling his disguised escape. There are those indeed in modern Parquet that will be aware of the Chevalier Du Sacs, whilst never having heard of Saccas himself. In more recent years and with the revival of the productions, one performance was interrupted by the hawkwood Rolf Bara who, incensed at the mockery made of someone who is something of a legend to the sojary, stormed the stage, scattering the performers to face down the crowd. It is perhaps now difficult to pick apart the knots made of the true expeditions of Saccas, and those fictions of the Chevalier Du Sacs. But one thing at least may be certain, that when old, half blind, but still determined Saccas died defending the Caelum from the mob. Doubtless happy that after so many years, in his mind at least, the Ottomans had finally come to storm what he still maintained to his dying day, was Crete.